Indigence and Ingenuity in the Susitna Valley

Yesterday’s blog and the comments it received brought to mind some of
the ingenious survival strategies I have encountered since I have been
here in subarctic suburbia.

Alaska is beautiful.  In the rainforests of Southeast you’ve got a
green fringe along the coastline, backed up by steep and rocky
slopes.  There are no roads between towns down there.  You go
by boat or by white-knuckle airlines.  Up north on the tundra
there is the stark beauty of long vistas, with the occasional drama of
a huge herd of caribou.  Still no roads between the
villages.  You fly, or mush a team of huskies, or hump it on a
four-wheel ATV or a snowmobile.

 Here along the Railbelt there is one highway parallel to the
railroad 484 miles from Seward to Fairbanks, no alternate routes, but
lots of short backroads off to the side into backcountry.  West of
the highway here, the next paved road is somewhere in Siberia. 
This is the quintessential nice place to visit, but you wouldn’t want
to live here, and I’ll tell the world that horrible lie, because one of
the great things about living here is the relative absence of
crowds.  Of course, this environment isn’t for everyone.  It
just happens to be just right for me.

I have written about what led me to come to Alaska and how I got here. 
I’ve listened to a lot of other people’s stories that are equally
wild.  For example, there was the woman who used to be the
receptionist at the local health clinic.  She told me that when
she divorced (in Tennessee or Arkansas or some equally hilly country
down there), she decided to bring her four kids and come to Alaska
because she’d heard of many job opportunities and a favorable ratio of
men to women in the population.  They looked at a map, and liked
the sound of “Trapper Creek” so they made that their destination.

Trapper Creek is a wide spot in the road north of Talkeetna and south
of Cantwell — a gas station, campground, motel, general store, pizza
pub, lodge/bar, elementary school, library, and a few other roadside
businesses that struggle to make it from one tourist season to the
next.  No work there, and the family arrived in October, around
the same time as the first snow.  They found someone kind who let
them park their pickup/camper on his land for the winter and they
squeaked through.  In the spring, she found the clinic job and in
a few years found a husband.  She loves it here and enjoys telling
her story as much as I enjoy mine.

Other stories don’t end so happily.  Women do come here looking
for the abundant, virile, outdoorsy Alaskan men, never having seen
those t-shirts we Alaskan women wear, that say “Alaska Men:  the
odds are good but the goods are odd.”  Couples come here and soon
find out that he loves it and she hates it or she loves it and he can’t
stand it.  Just in this little neighborhood since I’ve been here,
I’ve seen a dozen or more cheechako* marriages break up, and I don’t
get out and about very much.  Hell, sometimes even when they both
hate it, the strains of the trip up here and the disillusionment at
what they find is too much for the marriage and they leave going in
different directions.

Misinformation has brought many clueless cheechakos up here. 
After the State Supreme Court’s Raven Decision in the 1970s
decriminalized private possession of marijuana there was an influx of
stoners and hopeful entrepreneurs, especially after that exquisite
local strain, Matanuska Thunderfuck, became famous, and even after the
state legislature recriminalized pot.  One man left a lucrative
situation in Alabama diving for mussel shells (for sale to Asian pearl
cultivators as “seeds” for their pearls), and a profitable sideline of
waste-ground marijuana growing, to come here and grow pot under the
midnight sun.

Sure, we have 20+ hours of sunlight during summer time, but our
frost-free growing seasons some years are as short as 46 days. 
July is the only month that is reliably frost free, and I’ve seen light
frosts in the middle of July a couple of times.  Besides that, the
natural soil here is too acid for hemp.  This guy had planned to
do it the way he did it in Alabama and Florida, scattering seed out in
the wilderness and coming back later for the harvest.  In this
cold acid soil, the seed rots before it sprouts.  He adapted,
started sprouting the seed indoors and hauling bags of Pro-Mix growing
medium out into the woods.  It was a dismal harvest after the
native bugs got to his plants.  After a bear tore up his camp one
time, he decided to move his growing operation indoors under lights.

He parked a 15′ x 55′ trailer here, lived in the front room and turned
the back 2/3 of the trailer into growing rooms.  His crops
succeeded and he made some money, but he couldn’t handle the
winters.  He left the place in the hands of house-sitters and
wintered in Florida, Hawaii, or Mexico.   One of those
winters, his house-sitters abandoned the place for the lights and
warmth of town during an especially bad cold snap accompanied by power
outages.  His crop was lost, his water system froze and burst, and
he came back to a big smelly mess.

A stubborn guy, he kept coming back from those southern winters for
five years.  That last year, Greyfox, Doug and I moved in here as
his house-sitters after Sarah
and her lover Jono (who had just gotten here a few weeks before, about
the time this neighbor was ready to leave, and took the house-sitting
gig), split up and made their separate ways South, leaving the place to
us.  The frustrated and disillusioned entrepreneur came back in
the Spring and took his dog south with him, then came back in the fall
to clean out his safe deposit box and give me the title to this
trailer.  We haven’t heard from him since.

Then there’s the cabin on the bluff, and on the other bluff, and below
the bluff and down the road and then down the bluff again.

When Charley, Doug and I moved to the Su Valley in 1983, there was half
a cabin visible on the bluff facing the highway.  We could see the
back of it through the trees from our lot (which is just on the other
side of the highway from this place I’m living in now).  We
learned that someone had started building it and before it was finished
the place was condemned because he was building it astraddle of the
easement line along the highway, partly on public land.  Those
public access easements are a pain in the ass.  The space is
included in our lot’s measurement, but we’re not allowed to build on
it.  The builder of the cabin had just abandoned it after it was
condemned.

In 1985, a recently divorced man from Anchorage bought a lot in the
subdivision, moved a travel trailer onto it and started building a
cabin.  As his cabin grew each day, at night the half-cabin on the
bluff was disappearing.  He had been a restaurant manager in the
city.  Out here, he was just another Valley Rat trying to
survive.  He borrowed money and he stole not only building
materials but tools and machinery.

Eventually, the neighborhood got too hot for him and he left,
abandoning cabin, camp trailer, a dog and a cat.  His ex-wife came
for the cat.  I took the dog in after another neighbor threatened
to shoot him for getting into his trash.  Dirty Ernie used his
bulldozer to push the trailer and cabin off the bluff to clear that lot
for the new buyer who wanted to build something spiffier than that
used-lumber shack.

In 1990, while I was on my honeymoon with Greyfox, an oddly-assorted
family moved into the neighborhood, drawn here by the prospect of good
jobs on the Trans-Alaska Pipeline.  Never mind that construction
on the pipeline had been complete for a decade and a half.  This
is what I meant by misinformation.  They were from Arkansas: 
a woman and her son and daughter, and this man they had hooked up with
somehow.  He was a solvent huffer and was crazy even when he
wasn’t intoxicated on toluol or gasoline fumes.

They squatted on a cleared lot in the subdivision, where someone else
had parked a trailer for a year or two before becoming disillusioned
and clearing out.  They built a rickety cabin right on the rim of
the bluff, out of some logs they cut from other vacant properties
around here and some of the lumber they salvaged from the bottom of the
bluff.  After one winter in there, with an open fire in a cut-down
oil barrel and a hole in the roof to let the smoke out, the little girl
talked to her teacher at school about the man’s sexual abuse, and the
woman and her kids left.

The cabin started slipping off the bluff, and the man moved out. 
The last I saw him he came by here to pay me some money he owed
me.  He had just gotten out of prison for some time he did after a
long high-speed highway chase in a car he’d stolen from his new
girlfriend, with the girlfriend’s daughter whom he was supposed to be
baby-sitting, during which he had almost run down a construction crew
flagger.  His name hasn’t been in the police blotter column in the
local papers for a while, so he’s either back in jail or gone south, I
suppose.

*Cheechako:  newcomer, greenhorn, tenderfoot.

---

After three days of peaceful
canine/feline relations in this household, Hilary made an unprovoked
attack on Koji this afternoon.  He was just lying on the bed, and
she crept up to the side, jumped on him, whacked him a few times, and
settled back into a crouch beside the bed.  After a “don’t mess
with me” growl and snarl, he moved to the center of the bed, out of
easy reach.  I know it’s the kittens.  They’re driving her
nuts, and me, too.  Yesterday all three of Hilary’s little gray
kittens were chasing Auntie Orange Nemo around, up, and down between
the wall and the hanging Navajo rug.

I discovered a new Xangan, worthy of being read.  He is at elegblog. 
Okay, I can’t take credit for discovering him, really.  One person
had left a comment there before me:  the explorer MarcoPolo.

$845.76

Last night, the state announced the amount of this year’s Alaska
Permanent Fund Dividend.  Doug, Greyfox and I, and each eligible
Alaska resident, will get $845.76.  It is down from last year
because the stock market has been down.  The dividend is
calculated on a five-year average of earnings from the fund, and it has
been steadily decreasing all this century.  Still, it’s higher
than it was back in the 1980s.

When this thing was started late in the ‘seventies, there was a legal
challenge by a couple of lawyers, a husband and wife pair.  Their
challenge was on the residency requirement, and they lost.  Only
Alaska residents who have spent less than 90 days outside the state in
the past year (except active-duty military personnel who are exempt
from that absence restriction) are eligible.  Prison inmates
aren’t eligible, and there are some other restrictions, but I
digress.  Anyway, the dividends were held up for the first three
years because of that legal challenge.  Our first checks were an
even $1,000 to cover all three years.

For my family, that worked to our advantage, because Doug was born just
in time to be eligible for that thousand-dollar dividend, and he’d have
missed the first two years of dividends if they had been paid on
schedule.  Another little snafu with his check worked to our
advantage, too.  His dad and I got ours on time and they were
spent, pissed away on stuff like food, and clothes for the kid, before
we learned that zoning changes would force us to move from where we
were living south of Anchorage.  Doug’s delayed check arrived
about six months late, just in time to pay the down payment on the lot
we bought here in the valley, getting us out of the rent rut for life.

Some Alaskans at the upper end of the economic pyramid wouldn’t mind
abolishing the dividend program if that would prevent the imposition of
taxes to support state government.  Alaska doesn’t have any state
income or sales taxes, and rich people know that they stand to lose
more than a few hundred dollars a year if they start being taxed on
their income or their spending.  We at the other end of the
economic scale depend on the dividend and want it to stay.  Our
current governor, Frank the Bank Murkowski, ran on promises not to
touch the Permanent Fund, but he has been weaseling on that almost from
day one.

Down here on the bottom of the economic pyramid where we live, that money
every autumn means a lot.  Many people outside the cities have
only seasonal work.  That’s how it is for Greyfox, for commercial
fishermen, and loggers in Southeast Alaska, as well as everyone who
depends on the tourist industry for income.  This little spike in
income around the end of the work season helps us get through the
winter.

For people without even the seasonal income, it’s even more
important.  I know families here in the valley who have virtually
no money income at all other than the PFD.  Alaska has a
relatively high proportion of its population living a subsistence
lifestyle, fishing, hunting, trapping, gathering and gardening. 
My family and a lot of others around here live in hopes that the PFD
will get us through the winter.  Other families, dependent on
subsistence, do their best to make it last until next year’s PFD. 
They buy the supplies and materials they can’t make themselves or find
in the wild.

This Matanuska-Susitna Valley area is a poverty pocket, but some of the
Native villages are even worse.  The last statistics I heard, a
few years ago, said that in my end of the valley 40% of the population
lives below the federal poverty line, and in some villages that
percentage is as high as 90.  A more recent study said there are
approximately a thousand to fifteen hundred homeless families living here in the
valley.  I’ve met some of them:  a family camped in an old
junk car abandoned in a gravel pit, a teenager going from one friend’s
couch to the next so he can stay in school.  Homelessness in any
city is hard.  In this environment… I wouldn’t want to try
it.  I hope each of those families at least has a mailing address so they
can get their PFDs.

This time of year the broadcast media are full of ads offering
“dividend deals”.  You can sign away your PFD in advance for the
down payment on a new car or a trip to Hawaii.  I know that in
Anchorage there are people who do that.  Nobody I know here in
this neighborhood or at Felony Flats where Greyfox lives is prepared to
blow the entire PFD on big luxuries.  Of course there are addicts
who will be blowing most if not all of theirs on alcohol and/or other
drugs.  It has, historically, been a time of overdoses and wild
binges.  Many people may purchase a few small luxuries they
wouldn’t otherwise afford.  Doug and I plan to get two of our cats
spayed, because we can’t afford the luxury of more kittens.

Sales, swap meets and trade shows are scheduled for PFD time. 
Greyfox will be working two gun shows in October, and then he’ll have
scant income until the holiday bazaars.  If the weather isn’t too
wet for him to open his roadside stand, he’ll make a little money
selling knives or videos or some of the jewelry I make to people with
more PFD than they know what to do with.  There will be a spike
right around his birthday, October 12, because that’s the day the
direct deposits are made.  Then around the end of October, when
the paper checks start going out, if the weather is agreeable there
will be a month or so when there’s a trickle of income from customers
who have some extra money.

$845.76… not bad, living in the only state that pays its citizens
just to live there.  Of course, as Greyfox says, it is the only
state that HAS TO pay people to live here.

The Mind of a Serial Killer

I became interested in serial killers in the early 1980s, when the
phenomenon burst into the media.  There wasn’t much literature
available on the subject at that time.  I read what I could find and
asked the local librarian to order more through Inter-Library Loan.  I
still occasionally read a new book when one of my favorite authors has
one published, but the topic hasn’t the fascination for me that it had
before I understood what makes a serial killer tick.  A desire to
understand their psychology was the reason that drove me to read about
them in the first place.  The same curiosity and urge to understand has
driven me to study nutrition, the plants, animals and mushrooms in the forest
surrounding me, and cannibalism and war among the Anasazi, among other
things.

I’m writing this for two people, so don’t bother reading it if you have
no interest in psychopathology or serial murder.  First, I’m
writing for me, so I can get it off my mind and clear my thoughts for
other things.  The other person I’m writing it for will know who
she is, and may already have realized that her statement that some kill
“just because,” for no reason at all, was facile, flip, ill-conceived
and not thoroughly thought out.  If so, or if not, no
matter.  It’s a subject I have researched for almost a quarter of
a century, and it’s about time I wrote something on it.

Since most of what I have read on this subject has been written by the
detectives and criminal profilers who hunt them, and the psychologists
who study them, I have learned as much about these writers as I have
about the killers.  For example, each of them who has expressed an
opinion one way or the other regarding capital punishment, the death
penalty, is against it. 

As a group, those who study serial killers would rather have them kept
around to study, and those who hunt them generally hope to be able to
learn from them, too.  The cops and FBI profilers have gotten a
lot of information from convicted serial murderers that has helped them
apprehend others.  Thomas Harris’s fictional scenario, having the
FBI consult Hannibal Lecter in order to catch Buffalo Bill, was based
on fact.

It would also seem that as a group these cops, profilers and shrinks
are fans of Friedrich Nietzsche.  In any event, I have found one
particular Nietzsche quote in an inordinate number of their works: 
“If you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will gaze
back into you.”  Those who spend much of their time with serial
killers find themselves affected by that contact in ways that can be
chilling.  Just reading what those others have written about
their experiences has had a profound effect on me.

Writing this to refute a statement with which I disagree, I thought it
would be appropriate to include plenty of references to back up my
contention.  Since my contention is a negative, that nobody
kills over and over again for no reason at all, it cannot be
proven.  That’s an axiom of logic:  you can’t prove a
negative proposition.  I will simply state what I  have
learned about the various reasons that people do kill multiple times, provide links to authoritative sources, and challenge
anyone to find credible support for the contention that such motiveless
multiple killing does take place.

Every knowledgable person in the field agrees that many (some say most) serial killers
have abnormalities or lesions in the frontal and temporal lobes of
their brains and the anterior cingulate gyrus (part of the limbic
system).  Autopsies of executed killers have shown this. 
Some of the lesions have been caused by physical abuse, and some of the
abnormalities are thought to have resulted from early emotional abuse,
neglect and sensory deprivation.  The most extensive,
authoritative and interesting web reference I found on this aspect of what
makes a serial killer was written by Rhawn Joseph, PhD.

While those lesions and abnormalities of the brain can explain a
killer’s lack of impulse control, they don’t explain the impulse, the
motive.  In many instances, though, the abuse and neglect which
led to the brain damage can explain the rage and hatred that lead to a
particular killer’s choice of victims.  In contrast to spree
killers, whose victims are linked only by the fact of their having
crossed the killer’s path at a certain time, during the killing spree, serial killers
usually select victims of a certain type or class.

The Green River Killer chose prostitutes.  All of Ted Bundy’s
victims matched a certain physical type:  long-haired brunettes
who looked like his mother and his girlfriend.  Aileen Wournos
killed mostly traveling salesmen who picked her up when she was
hitchhiking and made sexual advances to her.  Jeffrey Dahmer’s
victims were all young men he picked up in a gay bar, and it has been suggested by Richard Tithecott, in his book Of Men and Monsters: Jeffrey
Dahmer and the Construction of the Serial Killer, that he was trying to “expel” or destroy his own femininity.

Many killers of prostitutes, including the Alaskan baker Robert Hansen,
claim that they are cleaning up society by ridding it of whores. 
My feeling is that more killers say this than really have it as their
underlying motive.  Sexual predators, who kill for the sexual
thrill and often cannot enjoy sex or achieve orgasm any other way,
often choose prostitutes, runaways, or hitchhikers, because they are
there, available on the streets and their absence might not be noticed
for some time, if ever.  Hansen was an avid hunter and his M.O.
involved capturing young women, flying them to remote areas and setting
them free then hunting them down.  I think that for him hunting
the ultimate prey was more important than cleaning up the streets, but
he was smart enough not to say so.

What I have gleaned from these decades of reading the works of those
who hunt and study murderers is that there is a typical scenario for
the creation of a sexual predator.  No one has ever mentioned
having encountered one who set out to be a serial killer.  Most
never set out to kill at all.  Many began as voyeurs, peeping
toms.  That then escalated into burglary or petty theft, often
stealing women’s underwear from clotheslines or dresser drawers. 
Sometimes the voyeurism and/or burglary escalates to rape.  Many
of the known or convicted serial murderers of the sexual predator type
were serial rapists first.  In one of their rapes, the victim
fought back, but not hard enough to get away, and she died.  After
that, simple rape doesn’t have the level of satisfaction, the thrill,
it once did, and so he begins killing all his victims.

Regardless of the motive for or circumstances of a first killing, some
people, once they have killed, find it to be addictive.  In a
typical case, it takes time after a murder for the craving, the need,
to assert itself, and then there is a period of victim selection and/or
stalking.  Following each successive victim, the interval between
killings usually decreases.  Sometimes the killer is caught before
his victims have become very close together in time.  If not, just
as in substance addictions, gambling, and other addictions, the
killings come closer and closer together until the killer eventually
decompensates.  Then he becomes less disciminating in his victim
selection and less organized in his methods.

Far from being “without reason” or motiveless, those killings after the
initial one are driven by the same biochemical cascades that motivate
drinking binges, sexual excesses, and wild manic flings of all
sorts.  It’s a cocktail of neurotransmitters that may include
endorphins and other brain chemicals, but always involves dopamine, the
pleasure chemical.  Each individual serial murderer may have
emotional and psychological reasons for selecting the type of victims
he does and for his choice of method, body disposal, etc.  He may
rationalize his acts just as drunks rationalize their drinking and
nymphomaniacs rationalize their promiscuity, but essentially he goes on
killing because he is addicted to it.

Among the informative web pages I found today are Lustmord, a broadly inclusive article in Court TV’s Crime Library and Natural Born Killers on the same site.  Termpapergenie.com has an excellent article on Identifying Serial Killers by Profiling.  Edward W. Mitchell’s master’s thesis, The Aetiology of Serial Murder: 
Towards an Integrated Model
does a great job of synthesizing a number of different theories. 
After 9/11, Alice Miller wrote a sensitive article that touches on the
roots of serial murder, The Wellsprings of Horror in the Cradle. 
On the website of the Death Penalty Information Center, Laura Mansnerus
wrote, “You don’t have to be a psychiatrist, Dr. Dorothy Otnow Lewis
says, to
know that something was terribly wrong with Ricky Ray Rector, who
before
his execution in Arkansas ordered his last meal and asked that the
pecan
pie be set aside so he could have it later,” in her article titled, Damaged Brains and the Death Penalty.  Also, I found two student papers from the Bryn Mawr College website that include even more links:  Predestined Serial Killers and Making a Monster:  The Biological, Social, and Artistic Construction of a Serial Killer From Psychosis to Sondheim.  And don’t forget my aforementioned best find, Rhawn Joseph’s EARLY
ENVIRONMENTAL & MATERNAL INFLUENCES ON THE DEVELOPMENT OF SERIAL
SEX KILLERS:  Deprivation, Abuse, & Serial Sex Killers.

Below are some of the books I’ve read in the last few decades, and a
couple that I wish I’d read.  The book now shown as “Currently
Reading” is one I haven’t read yet.  It is supposed to be released
next month.  Anyone want to buy it for me?

Sexual Homicide: Patterns and Motives
By John E. Douglas, Ann W. Burgess, Robert K. Ressler
OBSESSION
by John Douglas and Mark Olshaker
Mindhunter : Inside the FBI’s Elite Serial Crime Unit
by John Douglas and Mark Olshaker
JOURNEY
INTO DARKNESS : Follow the FBI’s Premier Investigative Profiler as He
Penetrates the Minds and Motives of the Most Terrifying Serial Criminals
by John Douglas and Mark Olshaker
UNABOMBER: ON THE TRAIL OF AMERICA’S MOST-WANTED SERIAL KILLER
by John Douglas and Mark Olshaker
The Cases That Haunt Us
by John Douglas and Mark Olshaker
The Anatomy of Motive : The FBI’s Legendary Mindhunter Explores the Key to Understanding and Catching Violent Criminals
by John Douglas and Mark Olshaker
Hunting Humans: The Rise of the Modern Multiple Murderer
by Elliott Layton
Demon Doctors: Physicians as Serial Killers
by Kenneth Iserson
Whoever Fights Monsters : My Twenty Years Tracking Serial Killers for the FBI (St. Martin’s True Crime Library)
By Robert K. Ressler, Thomas Schachtman
The Psychology of Serial Killer Investigations: The Grisly Business Unit
By Robert D. Keppel, William J. Birnes
The Encyclopedia of Serial Killers
By Brian Lane, Wilfred Gregg
Serial Killers
By Joel Norris
The Unknown Darkness: Profiling the Predators Among Us
By Gregg O. McCrary, Katherine, Ph.D. Ramsland
My Life Among the Serial Killers : Inside the Minds of the World’s Most Notorious Murderers
By Helen Morrison, Harold Goldberg
Compulsive Killers: The Story of Modern Multiple Murder
By Elliott Leyton
Portrait of a Killer : Jack the Ripper – Case Closed
By Patricia Cornwell
The DIARY OF JACK THE RIPPER
By Shirley Harrison
Criminal shadows: Inside the mind of the serial killer
By David V Canter
Signature Killers
By Robert Keppel

Questioning

This morning, as I stumbled and fumbled around here trying to make
breakfast with a tissue in one hand and a nebulizer in the other (bad
day for allergies and dyspnea), a question popped into my mind:

Is it my job to inform the ignorant and enlighten the benighted?  Or is it just my favorite pastime?

When I was very small, the Voice Inside my Head told me that my purpose
in life was to learn as much as I could.  I’ve been trying to do
that.  As long as I can recall, I have asked a lot of
questions.  People used to remark on that, when I was so little
that few people expected me to be able to put together a coherent
sentence, much less a searching question they couldn’t answer.  I
have always wanted answers and have kept on searching out new ways to
find them.

Eventually, I got into answering questions, too.  I never stopped asking, but I did develop some selectivity about who
I asked.  I try now to take my questions to those I think might
have the answers I seek and be likely to give them freely and
honestly.  I have asked a few questions here, ones that were
really important to me and that I had no idea who to ask. 
Usually, I’ve gotten no answers at all from Xanga, or only some feeble
attempts to assure me that such answers were not needed or that I’d
find them somewhere. 

Occasionally, I will throw out a question on an online forum whose
membership has some relation to the topic of my question.  A few
times when I’ve done that, the site admin has taken my question as a
challenge and slapped my wrist for it.  Although I may be naive
enough to go around asking for the answers I seek, I am not so naive
that I don’t recognize when someone wants to appear to have all the
answers but doesn’t have enough good ones.

I am now seeking keys and clues that might let me know beforehand when
my questions are going to be misconstrued as challenges, so I can avoid
all those painful slaps on the wrist.  ( just kidding, there –
I do feel some little sense of letdown when the experts reveal their
ignorance and insecurity, but it doesn’t hurt my feelings)

Below is a sample of one recent issue that got me slapped down on the forum where I sought an answer:

needed:  one Lingua Franca

My explorations in metaphysical areas have been very eclectic.  I
meditate and channel so that I have “input from within,” so to speak,
and I have also read widely in books, periodicals, and on the
web.  I have found many separate groups that exist to gather and
share information or revelation of a metaphysical nature.

Recently, I was talking to Greyfox about something I’d noticed. 
Several of these groups are apparently on parallel tracks.  I have
been finding messages with a common theme, but they are all couched in
different terms.  Some people speak of the faery faith and tell of messages they have been getting from the Fae.

Others are getting similar messages from aliens in flying
saucers.  Still others talk to dragons and the dragons tell them
that our planet is in for some awesome changes of a specific
nature.  The nature of those changes is the same as that being
revealed by midway creatures and Celestials to the readers of the
Urantia Book.

I suggested to Greyfox that perhaps these disparate groups are not very
different from each other in essence, but only in the vocabularies they
use to describe their experiences.  I said I’d like to find some
terminology in which I could communicate with all of them.  It
becomes wearing after a while, having to switch languages each time I
go to a different message board. 

Greyfox said I need a Lingua Franca.  Then ensued a discussion of
just what a “Lingua Franca” is.  I thought it meant something like
Swahili, an artificial language developed to facilitate trade.  I
don’t remember exactly how Greyfox defined it, but just know  he
didn’t agree with my understanding of it.  I guess what Greyfox
and I need is a Lingua Franca so we can discuss this need the
metaphysical community has for a Lingua Franca.

I’ll be back.

Peace restored?

Late last night, after midnight, I was reading in bed and Koji was
curled up in his usual place beside me.  First, one of Hilary’s
kittens joined us there, and then all four of them were romping and
rolling around, wrestling with each other and nosing around Koji. 
When Hilary came onto the bed, I thought there would be trouble, but
she lay down quietly beside me and watched the kittens play.

Koji was a bit jumpy and apprehensive later, after Hilary and her
family left, when Granny Mousebreath jumped onto the bed, but that’s
normal for him.  He has been wary of Granny since he was a puppy
and she asserted her dominance.  The only signs or sounds of
feline hostility so far today have been a few growls from Granny, aimed
at her fat old daughter, Muffin.

*mumble* *grumble*

Fog, in my head and out
the window… leaves falling, and the ones still on the trees are
spotted with brown, decaying before they fall.  Not the yuckiest
time of the year, that title goes to breakup, the season that passes
for spring in Alaska, but yucky enough.

At least it is peaceful in here right now, because Doug took Hilary and
her extended family into his room with him at 4 AM when he went to
bed.  In a comment on my recent blog, my sister-in-law, SheWhoRemembers,
said that Hilary’s aggression toward Koji is showing that she wants to
play with him.  Yeah, right, the same way cats like to play with
their prey.  I will cut her some slack because I know she is a cat
person, not a dog lover.  I will also give her the benefit of the
doubt and assume that she didn’t read the two earlier blogs in which I
described Hilary’s aggressive behavior.  She has said in comments
that reading my blog is a waste of her time.  I’ll even say thanks
for the laughs.

Doug and I both got a good laugh out of that comment, but for Koji it
isn’t funny at all.  After he was traumatized from being stomped
by the moose, he suddenly became protective of his food and water
dish.  Now he has not only the four adult cats freeloading off his
rations, but there are four kittens nosing around his dish, too. 
At one point last night while Koji was out on his chain, two kittens
had their heads in his water dish, one was pawing the kibble out of his
food dish and the fourth was batting them around on the floor.  If
they get near his feeding station while he is in the house, he growls
and charges over there and scares them away.

Any time Koji comes near a kitten, or one of them goes near him, or
when the kittens wander away from Hilary so that Koji is between them
and her, she attacks him hissing and clawing.  His snoot is scabby
from days of wounds, and is so tender that he won’t let me touch
it.   I’m thinking that it might be a prudent move to turn
Hilary and her family into outdoor cats before Koji loses an eye. 
But for right now, while they are all locked in Doug’s bedroom, all is
quiet here.

I enjoy quiet peaceful birthdays.  I have had a few horrendous
solar returns in my life, enough to make me a little apprehensive as a
birthday approaches, wondering what’s in store for me this time. 
Numerologically, the coming year is a seven for me:  initiation
and metaphysical goodies.  I’m prepared for that, have seen it
coming.  My inner life has taken such a big turn that I  have
a sense of dislocation or disorientation sometimes when I come down to
earth and notice all this old “outer” stuff still here.  I guess
I’ll adjust.

UPDATE, about 2 PM:

Thanks for the birthday wishes, and thank you BettyC for the laugh:

Yeah, ferocious little Hilary can’t weigh much more than 3 pounds, and
Koji is about 70 pounds, but she’s determined to make life miserable
for him.

Doug got up a few minutes ago and let the cats out of his room. 
Koji was asleep on the bed, and Hilary went right over and started
whacking him with her claws.  He growled and snarled in response,
she backed off briefly, then jumped right up on top of him and whacked
a few more times.  Her attacks are swift and sneaky, and every
time he bares those teeth and growls she backs off. 

She just doesn’t stay backed off very long.  Maybe if he’d bite
her… but that could be fatal and he won’t do it anyway.  When he
was a pup, Doug and I taught him bite inhibition.  When he feels
threatened he will make all sorts of growly noises and snarling faces,
but his bite is just a gentle mouthing.

He’s over there on the bed now, looking alert, puzzled and sad.  He doesn’t understand what’s going on.

A few hours ago, I had started writing a new blog when the power went
out.  That has been happening a lot lately, and Greyfox said that
at his end of the Valley our ISP was down today, too.  I have no
way of knowing how often such outages occur in more civilized areas,
but I suspect that we’re somewhat more subject to them here in the
boonies than most people are.

Hilary
the mother cat’s aggression against our dog Koji continues.  A few
minutes ago, Koji was standing by me in the kitchen and no kittens were
anywhere near.  Hilary walked up behind Koji and bit him on his
heel (that backward-facing “knee” on a dog’s hind leg, whatever it’s
properly called).  Then she jumped onto a convenient surface
knee-high to me.  When Koji turned toward her, she whacked him
across the snoot. 

My urge was to backhand the little feline bitch across the room, but I
lifted her gently by her scruff, carried her out the front door and
deposited her on the step.  I know that similar temporary banishments to the
outer regions have taught Koji some valuable lessons in manners. 
I also know that cats only learn what they want to learn, so…. who
knows?

I’m sorta nostalgic for the time (pictured here) before Hilary had her kittens, when she and Koji were friends.

---

Feedback on Feedback

The dialogue on sorry apologies continues.  The focus has gone
from my general observations about language and social peculiarities to
a more specific discussion of twelve-step “amends”.  I welcome
this, because in discussing it Greyfox and I are obtaining more content
for our Addicts Unlimited website.  One of our primary purposes
for that site is to provide reviews of every treatment and recovery
program we’ve encountered. 

Of course, the twelve-step programs are
ubiquitous, and we both have long-term and in-depth familiarity with
them.  Today, Greyfox posted an entry at his ArmsMerchant
site about steps 8 and 9, which will eventually become part of the
content at AuWay.org (that’s not a link because there is still nothing there
to link to).

Here is my launch point — the blue is where she disagrees with Greyfox; the red is where I disagree with her:

Maybe it’s unfair to pick this apart, since Kate says that it doesn’t
capture what she meant.  Fair or not, it’s there and I’m going to
use it.  Not only does she not say what she means, I’m pretty sure
she didn’t understand what I wrote, either.  I have to assume that
what she wholeheartedly disagreed with was this paragraph, which is the
only place in that entry where I paraphrased or quoted Greyfox:

Kate, it may be different in AA groups that you’ve
attended.  The
autonomous nature of individual groups is built into the Twelve
Traditions.  In groups I have attended, the majority of As
INTERPRET “amends” as “apology” and INTERPRET “apology” as saying, “I’m
sorry.” 

I have taken on sponsees whose previous sponsors relapsed.  I’ve
been told by sponsees that they had been told that making amends means
saying you are sorry.  I have heard other people say in meetings
how hard it was for them to go to people they had wronged and say they
were sorry.  I think it is reasonable to infer from those things
that these people think that “amends” means saying you’re sorry. 
Beyond implication and inference, I have heard still other people state explicitly 
that making amends means saying you’re sorry.

Never mind that such hollow and meaningless words don’t do anything to
make real amends, what I’m getting at here is that in my experience and
Greyfox’s (which is much broader and longer-term than mine)  many
if not the majority of people in twelve-step groups think that making
amends means saying you’re sorry.

Attributing the wording of Step Nine (or any of the other eleven steps)
to Bill W. may be an error.  This is a DIRECT quote from Bill W.:

Regardless of who first came up with the phrasing, I am going to assume
that somewhere down the line in proofing and editing if ACTIVE had been
meant, then that would have been what went into print.  “Active” implies doing something.  “Direct” implies immediacy as in this sense from onelook:  “adjective:  
immediate or direct in bearing or force; having nothing
intervening.”



Bill’s usage in the direct quote above also
supports by its context my inference that he understood that meaning of
“direct.”  In other words, if Bill (or whoever) had meant
“to
indicate that you have to DO something,” he would have used “active” or
another word of similar meaning, and not “direct.”  DIRECT amends
means, to everyone in every AA or NA meeting where I’ve ever heard a
discussion of the ninth step, making amends directly to the person who was wronged. 
This is also supported by the context, the rest of that sentence,
“except when to do so would injure them or others.”  That I meant
this sense of “direct” in what I wrote is also supported by my context,
in that I went on to mention the various sorts of indirect  amends taught and practiced in our NA group.

Gawd, I love semantics!

 
[Archaeologist or anyone else who may have misinterpreted what I originally wrote and now finds that disagreement to have been misplaced:
Check out Greyfox's latest blog.  There's something there for any twelve-step True Believer to really disagree with.]

---

Doug and I are both antsy this evening, feeling restless and looking
for reasons why.  We checked newsfeed but none of the headlines
resonated.  It may be something local that’s tweaking our psychic
antennae.

Anyhow, he was browsing through our CD collection for some diversion
and found one that’s been around for years and never been out of its
shrink wrap.  This restlessness isn’t exactly comfortable, but as
an “ill wind” it has blown in some pretty good music.

too much for a young mother to handle

Hilary, our cat who had kittens when she was hardly more than a kitten
herself, has been freaking out.  I neglected to mention that on my
last trip to town along with the load of mongo, I brought back one of
Frankie’s kittens.  That leaves Frankie (who had gone
frighteningly skinny coping with a litter of six) only four kittens to
nurse now, since Greyfox had already given another of the kittens away.

I mentioned recently that Hilary had been nervous and cranky because
her kittens were newly active and all over the house where she was
unable to keep track of them.  She decided for some reason that
our teddy bear of a dog, Koji, who had been thoroughly intimidated by
old Granny cat when he was a tiny pup, is now a threat to her
kittens.  Koji hasn’t quite been the same since his encounter with
the stomping moose in January.  He’s got a bad case of doggy PTSD
to begin with, and now Hilary keeps chasing him into corners every time
he even so much as sniffs at one of her kittens. 

Poor Koji.  He loves to sniff cat butts, and he HAS to get close and sniff at anything 
that moves in his environment.  When the kittens aren’t sleeping
they’re in constant motion.  Several times a day I’ll hear hisses,
yips and growls and scrabbling claws as Koji gets harried into a corner
again.

The
first few days that Albion, the new kitten, was here, Hilary hissed and
growled at him and tried to protect her kittens from him.  The
kittens, of course, weren’t having any of that.  When mom was out
of range, and even right under her nose, they would tumble and play
with Albion as kittens do.  Albion would approach wistfully when
they were suckling, and everyone would have their meal interrupted as
Hilary chased the interloper off.

I suppose that after a few days of rolling around on the floor
together, all the kittens started smelling the same.  Whether it
was that, or that Hilary just took pity on him, yesterday she started
letting Albion nurse, too. 

He had been fretful and whiny and sorta jumpy, naturally traumatized by
the 50-mile ride up the valley nestled between my lap and the steering
wheel in a pillowcase, and the hostile reception he’d gotten at first
in this strange place.  Now he clings to his new mom a little more
than her other three kittens do, but he seems okay otherwise.

I
hope Hilary will lighten up and relent a little with Koji.  A
couple of nights ago, all four kittens discovered the secret entrance
to the box spring under my bed.  They were zinging and twanging
around in there among the springs most of the last two nights.  It
made me feel as if I was sleeping on a pinball machine.

Koji usually sleeps on the bed with me, but with her babies in there
where she couldn’t get to them, Hilary took up a guard post beside the
bed.  Every time Koji approached, she would chase him away. 
He has been sleeping curled up in the corner near his feeding station,
in the draft from the crack under the door.  It can’t be very
comfortable for him, and I miss having my foot warmer on the bed, too.

I can only hope that the kittens soon tire of the underbed pin-cat
machine, or that they quickly grow too big to squeeze through the
secret entrance.  I’m not even sure exactly where and how they get
into the box spring, but I know that getting them out of it would
require some major furniture moving and possibly some disassembly as
well.

Love, and Fear, and Something Else

At earlier times in this life, I had many beliefs.  I was
frequently changing my beliefs, switching from one belief system (BS)
to another as I would find flaws in one and be introduced to the
next.  They were all, of course, other people’s ideas, things I’d
read or heard about.  I’m sure I didn’t exhaust the available
supply of BS, but I think I came close to using up every bit of believable BS with which I came into contact.

Gradually, I tired of the mental shifts involved in changing my beliefs
and started questioning the wisdom of belief per se.  Ten years or
so ago, when we received a copy of How to Believe in Nothing and Set Yourself Free
for review in the Shaman Papers, already it was preaching to the
choir.  I was more than ready to do that, but have found that
transcending BS isn’t as easy as it might sound.  I had to start
thinking of everything, every idea I had about anything, as a possible
model for reality, a working hypothesis, something to try out and
examine.

One little bit of progress came when I realized that “believable” is a
concept completely conditioned by one’s pre-existing conceptual
framework (BS for short), and that believing something to be
unbelievable is just as much a belief as any other.  To transcend
beliefs I had to stop not
believing in things, too.  Suddenly, a lot of the beliefs I had
once abandoned as part of rejected BS (the baby-with-the-bathwater
effect) had to be reexamined.  While I was at it, I figured I’d
better reexamine some of those incredible ideas that had made me reject
the BS in the first place.

Close to that same time, another preaching-to-the-choir book came in for review:  Neale Donald Walsch’s Conversations with God. 
Neale had rejected a lot of the same dogma I had, and his metaphysical
studies had apparently taken him down some of the same paths I’d
traveled.  Consequently, for a while I accepted one of the tenets
of his work rather uncritically.  That was the belief that every
act proceeds from one of two “sponsoring thoughts,” either love or fear.

Now I’m not so sure that’s how it is, really.  It occured to me
that this is a very dualistic belief, as absolutistic as any belief in
black versus white, right versus wrong, masculine versus feminine, and
so forth.  In school, I was taught that matter comes in three
states:  solid, liquid and gas.  Later on, the schools got
around to teaching about plasmas, and I thought, “Aha!”  That’s
the right number to correspond with the classical four elements: 
earth, air, fire, and water. 

Then, we moved into the New Age and some thoughtful being added The
Void into the classical tetrad to make it the now-mystically-trendy
five and I was more or less metaphysically disoriented until I heard
about Bose-Einstein condensate.  From that, it hasn’t been to
great a stretch of the imagination for me to think that there might be
some third “sponsoring thought” other than love and fear, just as there
are intersexed beings and other shades of gray.

I’m not talking about fear disguised as love, such as the case in which
someone commits suicide for “love” when he is left with his fears of
abandonment and rejection, or when someone commits murder or mayhem in
defense of someone he or she loves.  That’s fear, not love. 
What I mean is some motivating something 
that is neither fear nor love.  I was thinking about calling it
absent-mindedness or chaos, and then I thought that each of them might
actually be a separate case in itself.  So that leaves  me
with four motivating forces, and to keep up with the times I suppose I
must come up with a fifth.  If my drug of choice were not
amphetamine, at this point I’d probably be ready to make it a fifth of
gin.

See, all that metaphysical transcendence and personal development stuff can be fun.

…the kindness of strangers


Oh, that’s not quite right.  It’s really just many kindnesses from
some people I’ve never met.  It’s not right to call them strangers
when we’re all Xangans and have shared some intimacies in our
blogs.  There are varying degrees of intimacy, varying levels
of self-revelation among the people writing here.  I’m certainly
no stranger to anyone who reads much of what I’ve written.  James
once emailed me to say that reading my memoirs was like walking in and
coming upon me unexpectedly just as I step from the shower.  Yeah,
naked honesty… it’s not exactly easy or comfortable all the time, but
I came here on a mission from Spirit and I take it seriously.  A
journal that is less than honest wouldn’t really serve the purpose for
me.

But I digress.  I was thinking about the kindness of people I’ve
never met because I have been enjoying a generous gift from LuckyStars,
who had a local newspaper with an article about bikers that she wanted
to send me.  Since she was sending that, she asked me if there was
a book I’d like to have.  I told her that I’d just learned that
James Lee Burke has a new Dave Robichaux novel out, and she sent that
and the biker article, with a couple of other newspapers for good
measure.  What a treat!

Kansas City Star, that’s what you are, Marian.

I wouldn’t be able to blog at all if not for the generosity of some
other Xangans who gave me this computer I’m using and paid for some
vital peripherals for it.  The business license which makes it
legal for me to do readings at KaiOaty
was paid for by generous Xangan contributions.  This damned
disease keeps me from holding a regular job, but thanks to Xanga I’m
not a total burden on Greyfox.  That means more to me than I know
how to express.

I want to share something from the new book.  Don’t know why, and
won’t question the whys of it.  When I read this, I just had an
impulse to blog it, so that’s what I’m doing.  I love having the
liberty to do things like this.